"What are you talking about?"
"It's been bothering me since we arrived. Why didn't the Lasa notice us? Acknowledge our presence?"
Michael shrugged. "Maybe they weren't looking. Or maybe we didn't send the right signal to wake them up. Or they haven't noticed us either, which is quite likely."
"Maybe they weren't looking. If they weren't, that would suggest that this installation is running on autopilot. Maybe it and its ancestors haven't encountered a sentient species in a billion years. It could have evolved away from its original purpose and then Jentry's Envy would be an accidental mutation— a throwback.
"But if it was expecting us to know how to signal it? That would imply that this place was not meant for us. But I believe Jentry's Envy and, by extension, this place, was a gift. Meant for anyone who wanted to take it."
Michael saw his point. "The lack of a greeting is ominous."
"I was hoping that the system had signaled Crisler when he first arrived. Now I don't think it did. Look." He gestured to a long-range infrared view across the horizon of Apophis. Michael could see the faint thread shapes of the orbiting tethers and a vague pink glow that the window legend said was a retreating cloud of small packets bound for the construction shack.
Herat read Michael's look of incomprehension and scowled. "Look at the packets, man! The closest ones are days away from their origin. The whole stream stretches from a million kilometers above Apophis all the way to the shack. It's a long continuous flow of building material— but it's been cut off."
He was right. The last packet of building material sent from the Twins had gone out days ago. Michael saw where Herat was going with this: "The system started to shut down as soon as Crisler arrived!"
"Yes." Herat scowled at the display. "The question is, why?"
"But that's great, Professor. It's a major clue. We'd better laser this back to the fleet."
Herat glanced up, shrugging. "I suppose."
This wasn't like the professor at all. "What's wrong?" Michael asked.
For a moment Herat looked exasperated. Then his shoulders slumped and he said, "I know that it was right for me to join the halo. The Compact, I mean. The R.E.'s rotting from within. My career was winding down anyway; the Panspermia Institute's a farce, always has been… I just miss my children. I don't know if I'll ever see them again, Bequith."
"After this," Michael nodded to the Twins, "you can still go home. You're not a wanted man in the R.E., Professor. Crisler thinks you're safely dead."
"It's not that. I… sometimes I just feel my age, Bequith… Michael. After this…" Herat gazed sadly at the displays. "What will there be after this? This place is a treasure world, for sure. And it's the climax of my career. The end of a long search. It's funny. After all these years, I'm sorry to see the search end, maybe because I'm old enough to know that it's all downhill from here."
He laughed. "Never mind. Look, maybe the Lasa machinery is supposed to run on its own until someone intervenes. Then it hands control over to the newcomer. It's an instinct of the machine, it's designed that way. So maybe the shutdown means this place is functioning the way it was originally designed to: It won't eat up the resources of new colonists. It will only turn back on when they allow it, which would be when they are not competing with it for resources.
"Or I could be wrong. Anyway, send our observations to the fleet."
Later, when they turned the lights red for a sleep period— their orbit of Apophis would take several days— Michael found his mind whirling on about Rue, about himself, and about Laurent Herat. The last time Herat had acted like this was on the shores of Kadesh. Hard to believe that was over a year ago. At that time, the professor had come face-to-face with his own version of the kami of Dis. His lifelong enthusiastic chase after the alien had turned up worse than nothing. It seemed he had pursued ultimate answers for himself in that search and those answers weren't there. For a while, Jentry's Envy had convinced him it could be otherwise, but he was now coming again to face the same reality.
Thinking this made Michael sad and yes, he heard that whisper of the kami, saying it doesn't matter, nothing matters. To hold an artifact millions of years old in your hands and realize that every being for whom it had held significance was long extinct— that would rattle anyone who thought about it too long. And Herat had thought about such things his whole life.
This whole place could be a vast machine running senselessly on after the deaths of its creators. The Lasa must be extinct and if Rue Cassels had not stumbled upon Jentry's Envy, perhaps no one would ever have found this place. It would have gone on about its ceaseless activity, a kind of guardian of the underworld, of the tomb of interstellar space.
Time swept all away and it would sweep Laurent Herat away soon enough. Also Michael Bequith and all his cares and loves. These thoughts jumbled together in his mind, bringing him a confused, unpleasant melancholy, as he drifted off to sleep.
So they traveled on in their circuit of the giant failed star. All around, as they passed, the Lasa machinery that surrounded Apophis was changing. Over the next days Michael spent hours staring at the cloudscapes of the brown dwarf. Ancient and incredibly cold, they flowed like oil, a spectrum of icy blues visible only under extreme light amplification.
Apophis had been stillborn. It had never attained enough mass to burn hydrogen and so like all brown dwarfs it had glowed in its brief glory by gravity and magnetic forces alone. After billions of years, it had almost exhausted the heat of its birth. Only very rarely did the dwarf's magnetic field pull a twist of energy up through the atmosphere; then, wan arches of light would shimmer above the cloudscapes, only to flicker and collapse, exhausted, after a few minutes.
Nonetheless, bright things moved down in that realm, where flat, viscous thunderheads moved like charging armies across dark plains of dense cloud. Fusion-powered aircraft wove in and out among the starlit thunderheads, like birds at play. And in some places, great dark balloon cities drifted, tethers unreeling for hundreds of kilometers below them to tap the cloud decks. In the telescope, these balloons looked more like ancient battleships than craft of the air; to withstand eighteen gees of gravity, they were buttressed with squat girders and plated with titanium.
Were there windows in those floating fortresses? And did some entity, part of the mechanical ecology of Apophis, pause sometimes to gaze out at the stars?
Every now and then, sun-bright engines would kick into life atop one of those balloon cities. Stark nuclear light brought the gunmetal-blue cloudscapes into sharp relief, somehow making Apophis seem even colder and more alien. The tanker carrying lithium, beryllium and other hard-won treasures would climb laboriously for hours until it rendezvoused with a passing orbital tether.
The orbiting tethers grazed on whatever rose from the depths. They passed cargo packets up and past their orbital centers and flung them off their outermost arms. Each became a little world on its own, negotiating its position with the Twins through the music of gravity. After flying a million kilometers, each and every packet of cargo would arrive at a spot a few meters on a side, there to be caught by another tether in a higher orbit. This one would fling the cargo on its ultimate course, to meet with the invisibly distant construction shack that was the ultimate reason for all this activity.
Now, though, these intricate systems were falling silent. The jets cruised aimlessly. The floating cities withdrew their arms and hung silent. A few last cargo rockets clambered to the top of the atmosphere, but as they fell again they disintegrated in seconds. Stillness spread slowly, but unstoppably across the dark continents of air.